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Server Room Environmental Issues And Solutions

Server rooms and data centres are susceptible to many issues that can cause hardware failure and loss of valuable data. Environmental issues like temperature, humidity, water damage or smoke shouldn’t be one of them.

Remote monitoring solutions will notify your administrator of any of the above environmental issues. Some solutions can even take control via relay outputs to turn on a device like an air conditioning unit. Below are some products available on the market which can cope with your environmental monitoring demands, if you currently have an unprotected server room these products are a must-have. Most importantly these devices are relatively low-cost, especially if protecting an expensive server room or data centre.

Although this discussion is about server room monitoring the same systems can be applied to general building monitoring, warehouse monitoring and are widely used in museums, galleries and archive buildings.

The standard recommended limit for temperature in a server room is between 10C (50F) and 28C (82F) so if your concerned about the temperature of you server room then there are solutions like the Comet P8510, Sequoia Icarus or Sequoia EM01b (Nagios Approved) that will alert you if the temperature goes to high or low. These alerts can be sent via email, SMS or via a third party software application and notify you before the temperature reaches a critical point saving expensive hardware and priceless data.

If you want a more complete monitoring system some solutions can monitor temperature, humidity and other environmental parameters to ensure complete environmental safety for your server room. Some of these solutions include outputs so you can take control of other hardware i.e. air-con, door control or switch off power to units to stop them overheating. The Comet H3530 is a great solution for this type of application.

These types of devices can also connect to other sensors to cover a wide range of monitoring requirements and offer a complete environmental remote monitoring solution. I cannot stress how important these products are for a server room and should never be overlooked. Dealing in this sector we come across many clients who install this after a server room disaster has occurred to safe guard it happening again. So be prepared and don’t let it happen at all.

We hope from reading this you’ll see there really is no reason why you should leave such a valuable part of your business unprotected. With these systems you could save your business from a very costly incident.